A demonstration of contextuality using quantum computers

Abstract

Abstract Open-access, online quantum computers have shown significant improvements in the past decade. Although they still suffer from noise and scalability limitations, they do offer the possibility of experimenting with quantum circuits which would otherwise have required laboratory resources and prowesses beyond the reach of most students (and even researchers). In view of this, we revisit from the ground up the notion of contextuality and show that it can now be easily demonstrated on one of the IBM quantum computers. We showcase this with an implementation of the Peres–Mermin square which, despite the high error rates, manages to violate noncontextuality by almost 28 standard deviations.